Our plan called for two hog MODs to help us sneak into the nightclub, so we had to wait a couple days for Yuri’s freshly processed hog livers to grow to fruition in her hidden garden. That meant we had a couple days to explore the city.

Yuri spent some time with vendors buying herbs and potions she could plant alongside future livers to make her mods grow stronger. She also bought three full-heal potions. I offered to carry them all, but Yuri insisted we split the load. In case, you know, I died.

I spent some time at a bookstore scanning through a series of textbooks on spacial energies and magics. Didn’t learn much, though, because the shopkeeper who introduced me to the book wouldn’t leave me alone or shut up about his thoughts on the nature of reality. I ended up patting the gnome on the head, telling him he’s a NPC in a computer game, and walking out.

While I explored the city, I did my best to avoid any confrontations. I knew kicking ass impressed the A.I. and could win me some experience points, but I wasn’t too keen on knocking around law abiding citizens for a few reasons. One, that would make me a dick. Two, I didn’t want to get on the guards’ bad side. They patrolled the whole city in multi-racial clusters with their little weiner hats and I would rather make friends with them than piss them off. Especially since we were planning on pissing off a lot of hog-goblins soon.

I ended up stopping a scuffle in the street between two elfs outside a brothel, but didn’t see the need to blow them both to hell. I did see the need to poke my head into the brothel, however, if only for a moment. When I found it completely filled with cow women, I took my leave like the gentleman I was. After that, I started to wonder if some of the Lynn Ella programmers had been suffering from a nasty beastiality fetish.

I spent a half day back at Rolo Village, alone, trying to work out Todd’s hint about needing to be a little “edgy” to kill the cyclops. The pamphlet that he gave me, “because I was a specialist,” ended up being even more cryptic than he was about it. It was nothing more than a cartoon flip book that animated the word “Boom” over and over as the text and font progressively got bigger and bolder.

I looked around the coffee shop, but Todd wasn’t there. I tried chatting with him a few times but he never responded, which meant he was too busy, out of range—if that was even a thing—or had completely lost interest and was flat out ignoring me. The impression I got after our brief meeting was that any of those could be possible.

My outhouse worked as a safe haven, much like Todd’s Sanctuary of Solace did, while inside the time loop. It protected me from the repeating barrage. I watched the monster destroy the community over and over and over again from multiple vantage points, and if ever felt unsafe I just slipped into my pocket dimension pooper and waited out the storm.

I studied every move the cyclops made, memorized the shape of every building he decimated. By the time I had a few ideas I wanted to try, I was exhausted. I decided to come back another time to experiment, and maybe after I’d consulted with Todd further. If the guy ever returned my chats.

Yuri and I also did some trust fall exercises while blindfolded back at our inn. Well, okay, I attempted to get Yuri to do the trust fall exercises. She apparently thought they were stupid and pointless.

“This is a great way to work on our trust,” I said.

“This is why people make fun of Americans,” she said.

I didn’t quite understand what she meant by that, but decided not to prod.

I’d told Yuri about Todd and she’d told me to be wary of prisoners who had a lot more experience than I did because they were always trouble. When I pointed out the obvious irony in her statement, she just rolled her eyes and waved me off.

Then something extremely strange happened. While Yuri and I were inspecting her pods, which at this time had nearly completed developing their hog-goblin MODs, everything around me went … away.

It was as if someone pulled the plug on all my sensory data input. Suddenly there was no light, but there was no darkness either. I couldn’t feel anything, taste anything, smell anything at all. For a moment I was simply an inanimate entity floating aimlessly in a vast void of nothingness. I fell in and out of consciousness. Or did I? Truth be told I was so lost and confused for a time, I wasn't sure there was a way to define my particular state of existence. I was, but I wasn’t. It was back and forth like that for moments … or what is years? Who’s to say how time works in the mind when one is caught between worlds.

Then came a subtle vibration, which I interpreted as raw static until something apparently clicked on in my brain allowing me to recognize the vibration as voices.

There were two of them. Both male. One was scruffy and harsh, the other smooth and soft. I seemed to become aware of them while the scruffy voice was in mid sentence.

“… know what you’re saying, Ted. But my question is why does Coragan want to track this guy in particular? They just plugged him in a week or so ago.”

“I don’t know. I think it has something to do with his sister. That’s my guess.”

“Who’s his sister?”

“You ever heard the story of how Coragan lost his eye?”

“What? That was her? She’s the cop?”

“That’s what they say. She’s also the reason Coragan is hiding out at the Alaskan facility right now.”

“Oh, so this a revenge thing, I see. She pops his eye so he pops her brother.”

“He won’t kill him. Not yet. If I know Coragan he’ll take his time. Torchure the poor kid. Maybe send some in-game screen captures to his sister. I heard they already got to the other brother.”

“Jeez. What kind of lunatics are we working for?”

There was a pause, followed by laughter.

“Okay, I’ve got the device ready, if you wouldn’t mind performing the incision, I’ll slip this baby in there nice and …“

The voice drifted as the rest of my senses came crawling back to me, slow as tree sap. The first thing I noticed was a prickling all over my body. It reminded me of when I fell asleep wrong on my arm as a kid. I’d woken to a strange piercing, tingling pain in my fingertips and chest while the rest of my arm had gone cold and completely numb. I was horrified. It took a lot of shaking and rubbing to bring life back into the limb, and that’s exactly what it felt like all over.

There was a cold prick sensation to the side of my head. It came out of nowhere, and made my whole body jolt. I heard beeps from somewhere deep in the room. There was something heavy on my face. I could hear air rushing in and out of it. I opened my eyes to a blazing glare, brighter than the sun. My eyes were out of focus, but I was able to gather a vague image of a bouquet of tubes, lots and lots of clear tubes with liquids sloshing through. All of them were protruding from parts of my body, tethered to unknown mechanical devices humming and flashing around me.

Dark figures moved in my peripheral. I had no control of my neck muscles but my eyes were a different story. Moving them from side to side sent sharp pains through my skull from temple to temple. My heart was pounding, but it was a distant, almost underwater sensation. It was as if it had been removed and stuffed into a cadaver next to me.

“What the hell?” came the smooth voice. “Is he coming back up? That’s impossible. Check his … “ The voice drifted as I felt myself disappear back into oblivion.

And then I was back in the garden, my hand up against the pod feeling it’s warmth, exactly where I’d been when this strange episode started.

I stood there for a moment, staring at the naked hog curled up inside the purple pod. I cleared my throat and pulled my arm back.

“There you are,” came Yuri’s voice behind me. “I turned around and you were gone,” she said. “Where’d you go?”

“I … I don’t know,” I said, turning to face her. I blinked a few times, remembering the pain in my head. It was gone, but the memory of it echoed like a ghost in my bones.

“I think I need to talk to … ping Todd again about someth—“

And that’s when Susie, the Baph-o-larm slammed down next to us so fast and so hard Yuri and I both screamed. For a moment Yuri and I just stared at the creature.

“What?” said Susie, licking his eyeball.

“Susie,” said Yuri, a hand over her heart. “You scared the … what are you doing?”

He told us he’d discovered a new place to garden on an outcropping on the outside of the mountain that could only be accessed via an abandoned mining tunnel.

“It’s a really good place. You ain’t gonna have any problems there,” said Susie. “And it’s big enough for at least a dozen pods. Maybe twenty.”

Yuri asked him to keep an eye on her temporary garden behind the Journeyman’s Stay, and to mind the gnome that ran the place who was still ignorant of our little operation.

The goat wanted more pay, but of course, we’d already spent our whole budget. I ended up giving him a mouthful of apples from one of the bushels I’d just purchased. He said it would be the last time he’d accept apples as payment. What the hell did a flying goat man want with coins anyway?

While Susie and Yuri talked about the specifics of her remote alert system in her interface that the goat had access to, my mind drifted back to the voices in my … dream? Vision?

What was that?

And then it hit me.

I must have woken up, if only for a moment, in the real world.

Two men were talking about … what? The memory was fleeting the way my dreams always were. There was something about a man named cardigan. No, that’s a kind of sweater. Cora … Coragan. That was it. Also, they mentioned something about … Jane? And … John? Something happened to them, but what? What was it?

The two men also did something to me, something intrusive. I could sense it somehow. I slowly lifted my hand and touched my left temple. There was an echo of pain there, a remnant of … what? Didn’t they say something about a tracker?

“Jack,” said Yuri, “Are you listening? Susie says we may need to use your spaceball to dig our way through the tunnel to this outcropping. Jack? Jack, hello?”

“I have to go,” I said.

“What’s his problem?” I heard the goat man say as I walked away.